Yesn’t.
In a nutshell, Social Security is a government run pension/retirement savings system. With a few exceptions you can look up on your own if you’re curious, every American worker pays into the social security system as a tax on income. Each person in the system, so basically everyone working a job in the US, gets an account number, their Social Security Number.
For awhile after the system started, you’d get your SSN when you got your first job. At some point, they introduced a tax credit for parents with children, if you had a child you could deduct them on your taxes. People started claiming they had more kids than they did to pay less taxes. Sure, let’s just tell the government we have 12 kids, they won’t know we only have 5. The solution to this problem was to require the children being claimed had social security numbers. This had two effects: 1. it got rid of those “paper children,” and 2. Signing up for social security and getting a social security number is part of being born; every American now has a serial number, issued on a card.
The kind of people who are ruining our nation right now are opposed to a national ID system because they hate being part of a functioning society. So we don’t have a national ID card the way many nations do. State governments issue a number of IDs of various types, the de facto standard for identification in the US is a driver’s license. The vast majority of Americans have one. But, not all. The only unique number common to (practically) ALL Americans is a Social Security Number.
Numbers like credit card numbers or sanely designed ID systems have built-in checksums, not every number that fits the regex for a Visa card number is a valid Visa card number. A social security number doesn’t have that; it wasn’t intended as an ID number, it’s an account number, you can tell when and where it was issued by looking at it because it’s a serial number. And because most Americans younger than the president were issued their numbers at birth, you can guess a lot of their number based on where and when they were born. The last four digits are a simple serial number…and often used by banks and such as a second factor. “Okay, just tell me your date of birth and the last four of your social.” the bank teller will ask you out loud.
It’s something we’re gonna have to fix after the war.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 weeks ago
One irritating note on this: there’s a limit to how much social security tax you pay per year. So if you’re making a lot of income, you just stop paying this tax partway through the year.
This is pants on head stupid and regressive. It should be the other way around. Your first, let’s say $10,000 should be exempt from the tax, and it should get steeper as income goes up.
Rich guy absolutely does not need the bump in take home pay from hitting the cap. Poor guy definitely could use the extra income early income not being taxed.
I’m just so mad all the time about people licking the boots of the rich. They don’t need breaks! They’re rich! They’re going to be fine!